Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Goodbye Benny.

Welp, I finally did it. Finally gave Benny the Fuck Off he's had coming for only about two years now. He'd gone from being an asshole but a great fuck, to being an asshole and a lousy fuck. And today he just crossed a line.

I feel a little bad. I don't like to lose people. Even horrible people! I've lost my only sure thing now.

But he had me tied up, he hurt me in an extremely not-fun way (trying to shove way-too-big things into me when I wasn't ready, FUCKING OW), I safeworded and he didn't care.

That's not quite fair to him. He cared some. He stopped within 30 seconds at the most. Then he tried again and I had to tell him "no, really, fucking red." to get him to stop for real. Then he left me tied up for a bit while he washed his hands and made fun of me and joked about "if you're tied up, you're at my mercy." Then I started screaming at him and he let me go. He tried to apologize for a bit (and I hung around to listen, because I'm a complete softy like that) but I was out of there pretty soon after.

Hey, maybe that's why I feel bad!

Bondage is like shooting, okay? (YESSS! I finally found a way to make this analogy! My circle as a sex/kink/guns/strained analogies blogger is COMPLETE!) You can have fun with it, you can laugh while you're doing it and you can play around with it in certain ways, but there are some rules that you must follow because there are areas where it stops being a game and intersects the Extremely Real World. You have a device that can actually kill people; you have a person who actually cannot move. Which is why it's never a joke to point a gun at someone's head, even if it isn't loaded; and it's never a joke to restrain or hurt a person against their will, even if it seems like you're just playing and it's not a big deal.

In a way I'm glad he did something so unambiguous. It made my decision easy. I can rationalize going back to someone who's just kind of a jerk; I can't very well go back to someone who's liable to give me an amateur episiotomy and think it's funny. (In another way I wonder if somehow I was ambiguous, if I somehow made it seem like I was up for another go or I was willing to joke around. But really now, in Kinkland, "red" is about the least ambiguous thing there is.)

So that's Benny. We had some times, no denying it. But after tonight, I'm pretty fucking glad we won't have any more.

20 comments:

(In another way I wonder if somehow I was ambiguous, if I somehow made it seem like I was up for another go or I was willing to joke around. But really now, in Kinkland, "red" is about the least ambiguous thing there is.)

I hate that we so often end up wondering if our "red/no/quit it" was ambiguous. Because really it's not. If men want to understand, they're not dumb, they can figure it out even if the pair of you don't share a common language. (BTDT.) Red means red, no ambiguity, and it doesn't take 30 seconds to work that out either.

Zeborah - I can see where he was coming from, and I don't think it was mustache-twirling evil quite so much as the desire to save face. "She'll like this again if I just fix it a little, and then I won't be a loser at sex!"

And likewise, making light of the situation afterwards turns it from "I broke a serious rule, I suck" into "she gives me a hard time and I give her a hard time, aren't we silly?"

I don't think Benny is exactly evil or exploitative, he's just dumb and insensitive and exceptionally bad at reading my signals and for those reasons I won't see him again.

One thing I really like about kink is the whole safeword thing. There are people, male and female, who do silly things like say "I never want to talk to you ever again" when it means "I am mad at you and you need to grovel." The very artificiality disposes of ambiguity. Get old enough, you run into enough people who were ambiguous. Or disingenuous.

It is good when people are such obvious bozos that it makes it perfectly clear.

That's really not cool. If you're going to fucking top someone, they should never have to safeword for something as minor as a dildo. You should really already be able to read your partner well enough to tell if they're ready, or you should go back to the amateur leagues until you can.

Perlhaqr - Yep. It wasn't "yay I'm having fun yay... RED, gotcha!", it was more like a lot of uncomfortable noises and faces and "ow" being ignored before it got up to that point. I'll credit him with "didn't know" rather than "didn't care" but it hardly matters to me; I can't have sex with someone who can't take really obvious feedback.

Do you think he now understands what he did? I mean, he committed as much rape as he was comfortable with. He might have done it out of stupidity or desperation or whatever, but he did it--do you think he realizes that?

Like William, I think the safeword thing in kink is a really cool device. One is allowed to play with social conventions, roleplay a little non-consent, "no" doesn't necessarily mean no... But "red" means fucking red. Always. It is the scene stopper, the spell dissolver. The combo breaker.

I probably even take safewords a little too seriously and put the brakes on too hard. I might be kind of a loser at topping, but I can live with that better than "red" meaning "she's just being coy".

You know, it is really nice when they do you the favor of being unambiguous. (My last ex did me the favor of trying to blackmail me right after we broke up. I had been feeling SO ambivalent about leaving him, too!)

I'm sorry you had to deal with that- and no, you WEREN'T unclear. Cause safewords, you know (obviously you know), not a fuzzy concept.

Don - No. He was all about the "seems like we both miscommunicated," and I'm fairly sure his view of events goes like:

"I was just trying to show her a good time and for some reason she suddenly didn't like it. I tried to fix it but she just got madder and I stopped. I joked around with her a little but she was still mad so I let her go."

Bringing up the "R" word would just make me crazy in his eyes, it's not exactly accurate anyway, and I'd have to talk to him again to do it. Really, I don't have much interest in educating/shaming him--all I want to do is not see him.

You're more forgiving than I am. I can see how he would think that way, but not you.

I didn't mean to recommend that you accuse him of rape and deal with his reaction to that, but it seems accurate to me, and I don't have to deal with his reaction, so I said it. If you force someone to have sex they don't want to have, it seems clear to me that the word in English that best describes that action is rape. I'm sure you're right and that wasn't his intent, but that's what he did,and if there had been no kink involved, just a man and a woman having sex, the analogy would be a situation where she says she wants to stop and he refuses. If he used his strength and size to hold her down and continue against her will, that's rape. If she's tied up, I don't see how that makes it any more ambiguous.

The rule in our society, for better or for worse, is that you can withdraw consent for sex at any time except after it's over. As Zeborah said, it's not an ambiguous rule. It's hammered into us over and over, and if Benny went to college he probably literally sat through videotaped indoctrination sessions and discussion groups on "no means no." Most guys resent these because they're repetitive and unnecessary. A few resent them because they figure there are gray areas and maybe no doesn't always mean no.

What they're missing is that even if no doesn't always mean no to the one who says it, it has to be clear and unambiguous to the one who hears it, because he can't actually read his partner's mind and it's dangerous for him to start thinking he can. The way you treat people who are in your power--whether because they're smaller and weaker, or because they're handicapped in some way, or elderly, or you have some authority over them--defines your character.

I'm not sure the situation calls for formal charges or anything (that's obviously your decision), but that's a fucked up thing to do to someone and "rape" is the right word for it. I'm sorry that this happened to you, but as far as you wondering whether you were ambiguous or whatever, absolutely not. When you agree to sub for someone, you're placing a lot of trust in them (I think the analogy is that you're letting someone hurt you who you know would never hurt you). To violate that trust by not immediately re-evaluating the situation when a safeword is uttered is just despicable.

On a lighter note, this reminded me of Gerald's Game (sans the being stranded in the woods while a maniac is loose). I was hoping you kicked him in the balls.

Based only on the way I read your description, "rape" is definitely too strong a word.

"We were trying something and it didn't work, so I said stop and he stopped. Then he tried again in what he though was a different way and as soon as I said stop again he stopped completely" is a long, long way from "he used his strength and size to hold her down and continue against her will".

Calling every bad decision related to consent "rape" dilutes an important word. It's similar, frankly, to the folks dismissing all Obama detractors as racists.

Don't get me wrong; the dude's clearly incompetent, oblivious, untrustworthy, and not worth your time even if you _could_ trust him. Sounds like you're far better off without him.

I agree with you that it's important not to cheapen words by overusing them and, upon re-reading what I wrote, I made it sound like I thought the guy should go to prison and I don't. However, not stopping /immediately/ at the drop of a safe word is a violation. Thirty seconds of having something forced into your body when you don't want it there is a long time. Then, to be teased when you're helpless and just want to be untied is a further violation.

Again, I agree that calling every violation of this nature "rape" might dilute the meaning. Then again, it might make some people realize that when a person no longer consents to what's happening, it's time to stop--no questions asked, no hesitation. So I guess the question is, "Is 30 seconds of violation long enough to be considered 'rape'?" The legal answer would, of course, vary depending on the jury. But, I don't think anyone can really know how they'd feel until it's happened to them.

Actually, I owe an apology. I'd misread the original post as saying that thirty seconds was the time he left her tied up for.

Since you've pointed out what the post _actually_ said, I'm ratcheting up my outrage suitably. I still think the R word is _slightly_ misplaced here, but not so much as I'd first thought. Thanks for clarifying.

hi, i'm some weeks late to the party (because surgery, never bounce back like you thought you would. sigh)

years and years ago, i saw fire-play. i didn't care about BDSM as a whole, but fire!. and i ended up working as a Domme doing fireplay, waxplay, violent wand.one day, after about 3 years of being the fire-Domme, guy wanted me to flog him.i said "i am so very sorry, i have absolutely *NO* clue how to flog someone, i have never done, and i'm not starting now in open-club conditions"guy came back, day after day (well, weekend-day after weekend-day), insistant that *I* be the one to flog him. he would accept other people, but only after he and i argued for a good ten minutes.disaster strikes, and flames are no longer tolerated in any establishment that serves alcohol, doesn't matter if it's a BYOB place or not.so i am now forced to learn other forms of Domme-ing.first night i am learning, guy shows up all smug with a "now you can't tell me no" attitude.

and he yelled red within a minute. i did not know what the fuck i was doing and no one else cared. i quit, right then, because it was really horrifying to me that i had made this guy safeword (note: what i did was "wrap" the flogger, so that it curled over his shoulder". guy was insisting that "red" was not the "stop right now!" word, just the "slow down" word (which, btw, we used totally different words! we used "Slow" for "yellow" and "End" for "red"). it was my first time acting a Domme. i messed up. i quit (i let them talk me into coming back, but only if i was given real, actual, honest training. i was the only person working there who was actually trained, which i found out a year or so later, so i quit again. because that is also terrifying - a dungeon that doesn't have a single trained Top except the owner?).

i think i'm just telling you this story because i think you will understand how i felt - pressured into doing a thing i did not want, and then immediately fucking it up (to whatever extent it was actually fucked up) and possibly hurting someone. it feels like what happened with you here, except the exact opposite (does that make sense), except yours was worse.

but i am glad to be able to read your blog again (how i missed it!) and i am searching, as i type, for Cosmocking :D

i DO NOT at all mean to say, even imply, that *you* fucked up. i was saying that *I* fucked up. and that my fuck-up feels similar to this situation, except A) you did not fuck up, Benny did, and B) yours was worse. (i say worse because you were in pain and i was not in pain. and you were having something done you did not want, whereas i was doing, if not what i wanted, something that i did not actively *not* want to do.)

i am blaming the duladid on my inablity to properly communicate anymore. i want *off* this shit.